In an interactive augmented reality (AR) system, people are, most of the time, immersed in an environment rich of visual and audio feedback. The sense of touch is lacking in most of the AR environment. We present an augmented reality system where people can see life-size virtual human avatar in a real environment, and be able to have a physical haptic interaction with the avatar.

"Tiger Training" explores the relationship between real and virtual worlds via interaction with virtual animals in immersive mixed reality environments. This interactive, participative installation encourages viewers to "train" virtual animals using hand signals and voice commands. Virtual tigers are not easily "trained" requiring learning appropriate ways to coax responsive actions.

A real-time system for capturing humans in 3D and placing them into a mixed reality environment is presented in this paper. The subject is captured by nine cameras surrounding her. Looking through a head-mounted-display with a camera in front pointing at a marker, the user can see the 3D image of this subject overlaid onto a mixed reality scene. The 3D images of the subject viewed from this viewpoint are constructed using a robust and fast shape-from-silhouette algorithm. The paper also presents several techniques to produce good quality and speed up the whole system. The frame rate of our system is around 25 fps using only standard Intel processor-based personal computers. Besides a remote live 3D conferencing and collaborating system, we also describe an application of the system in art and entertainment, named Magic Land, which is a mixed reality environment where captured avatars of human and 3D computer generated virtual animations can form an interactive story and play with each other. This system demonstrates many technologies in human computer interaction: mixed reality, tangible interaction, and 3D communication. The result of the user study not only emphasizes the benefits, but also addresses some issues of these technologies.